• Work as practice and not hiding from life
• Ethics and being guardians of awakeness
• The right amount of perfection
• The danger of projection when you identify as an Order member
• Proving yourself in life before you get ordained

(Interview recorded in 2007)

MANJUSVARA’S ANNALS:

In 1968 Manjusvara was 15, at school (and in the Scouts) in Ware, Hertfordshire.  He was mad about music (and trucks). He’d started playing a toy piano when he was about 3 and was well on his way to becoming a composer, having piano lessons and playing his own music.

In 1978 Manjusvara was 25 and deeply immersed in his music studies.  Having studied composition at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, he was doing an MA in electronic music at the University of Durham. He went on to write music for films, dance, and the theatre.

In 1988 he had been ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order for a year, the course of his life having been altered by a near-fatal car accident in California in 1982. When not running fundraising for the then Aid For India (Karuna Trust) Manjusvara was living in New York City, West Village, with his love and future wife Meg Moginot who he had met in New Hampshire when part of the original Aryaloka community. He’d made many trips to the USA.

In 1998 Manjusvara was dividing his time between writing (poetry, criticism and fiction), editing, and teaching, having stopped composing due to his hearing loss.  He was still working for the Karuna Trust, training fundraisers for door-to-door appeals and travelling to India.  By 1998 he had co-founded Wolf at The Door creative writing workshops with Ananda and begun the annual Dhanakosa ‘Wolf Retreats’.

In 2008 he was writing The Poet’s Way, the sequel to his first book on writing as a spiritual practice, Writing Your Way. He’d also had his poems and essays appear in leading journals in England and America, and he was the editor for Weatherlight Press, which he’d started to publish the work of his ‘master’, the American poet William Stafford, in the UK.

In 2018 Manjusvara had been dead for 7 years, following a massive brain haemorrhage in the middle of co-leading a Wolf at The Door retreat at Dhanakosa in June 2011. The year before he died he’d published The Poet’s Way and he continued to work for Karuna.  His friend and colleague Ananda posthumously published his poems in a collection called Lost and Found in 2013, and Amalavajra and other friends brought out his unfinished novel The Deal Runner in the same year.

• Work as practice and not hiding from life
• Ethics and being guardians of awakeness
• The right amount of perfection
• The danger of projection when you identify as an Order member
• Proving yourself in life before you get ordained

(Interview recorded in 2007)

MANJUSVARA’S ANNALS:

In 1968 Manjusvara was 15, at school (and in the Scouts) in Ware, Hertfordshire.  He was mad about music (and trucks). He’d started playing a toy piano when he was about 3 and was well on his way to becoming a composer, having piano lessons and playing his own music.

In 1978 Manjusvara was 25 and deeply immersed in his music studies.  Having studied composition at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, he was doing an MA in electronic music at the University of Durham. He went on to write music for films, dance, and the theatre.

In 1988 he had been ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order for a year, the course of his life having been altered by a near-fatal car accident in California in 1982. When not running fundraising for the then Aid For India (Karuna Trust) Manjusvara was living in New York City, West Village, with his love and future wife Meg Moginot who he had met in New Hampshire when part of the original Aryaloka community. He’d made many trips to the USA.

In 1998 Manjusvara was dividing his time between writing (poetry, criticism and fiction), editing, and teaching, having stopped composing due to his hearing loss.  He was still working for the Karuna Trust, training fundraisers for door-to-door appeals and travelling to India.  By 1998 he had co-founded Wolf at The Door creative writing workshops with Ananda and begun the annual Dhanakosa ‘Wolf Retreats’.

In 2008 he was writing The Poet’s Way, the sequel to his first book on writing as a spiritual practice, Writing Your Way. He’d also had his poems and essays appear in leading journals in England and America, and he was the editor for Weatherlight Press, which he’d started to publish the work of his ‘master’, the American poet William Stafford, in the UK.

In 2018 Manjusvara had been dead for 7 years, following a massive brain haemorrhage in the middle of co-leading a Wolf at The Door retreat at Dhanakosa in June 2011. The year before he died he’d published The Poet’s Way and he continued to work for Karuna.  His friend and colleague Ananda posthumously published his poems in a collection called Lost and Found in 2013, and Amalavajra and other friends brought out his unfinished novel The Deal Runner in the same year.